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OPEN HOUSE

WRITERS REDEFINE HOME

Unremarkable variations on an unremarkable theme: Home is where you feel at home.

A variety of writers present different definitions of “home” in this uneven assortment of essays, some previously published.

As editor of the fifth installment in Graywolf’s Forum series, poet Doty gives himself the first and nearly the last word. (One short essay follows his at the end.) He begins by observing that we’re all trying to find “home,” whatever that may mean to each of us, and ends with a piece about how a 19th-century painted panorama in the Netherlands serves as a metaphor for Life. Elizabeth McCracken lovingly describes the Des Moines homes of her grandparents. Honor Moore writes about leaving an old house in Connecticut where she lived for 30 years and finding a new home in New York City. She is one of several writers who allude to 9/11, with Mary Morris providing the most effective image: from a subway crossing the Manhattan bridge on September 12, “people stare at the space where the Twin Towers stood and they begin to cry. Inexplicably, silently, the entire car is filled with weeping people.” Morris’s “home,” by the way, is the subway; it’s where she reads, writes, thinks. For a number of the writers, Doty included, sexuality and home are inextricably entwined. Michael Joseph Gross finds he’s more at home having sex with strangers than he is being in the home of his parents, who had difficulty accepting his homosexuality. Reginald Shepherd—in an overlong, overwrought rumination—discovers that his home is Robert, his lover. Spunky spelunker Barbara Hurd considers caves and the comfort conferred by hidden spaces. Bernard Cooper defines home as the passions you pursue and eventually inhabit—in his case, pop art. Sensibly, the editor ends with a poignant, provocative piece by Victoria Redel, whose severe scoliosis forced her to inhabit a Milwaukee body brace 23 hours a day throughout her teenage years.

Unremarkable variations on an unremarkable theme: Home is where you feel at home.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-55597-382-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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